What Cloudflare is doing this time is a bit different from the usual “support encrypted payments.” It launched Monetization Gateway on July 1, allowing sellers to charge for web resources, with settlement in USDC on Base and Polygon.
Under the hood, it also uses x402—bringing back the 402 status code in HTTP, which had long been barely used, and tailoring it specifically for stablecoin transactions. The pitch is near-instant confirmation and very low fees. Even more interesting, Will Papper from Cloudflare said that the underlying expansion approach borrows from Ethereum’s original sharding design.
The reason is pretty straightforward: if the future involves AI agents frequently calling resources and paying automatically, the payment layer needs to handle 5 million to 50 million transactions per second, which current blockchains themselves still can’t do. So what’s truly worth watching in this direction is that stablecoin payments are starting to move beyond just payments for people and toward machine-to-machine settlement.
Cloudflare itself covers about 20% of global network traffic. Once an infrastructure company like this gets its on-chain payment interfaces working smoothly, market imagination around ETH scaling, L2 payments, and stablecoin network effects will be elevated again. There are still two things to watch next: first, whether this product sees real usage; and second, whether this route—borrowing Ethereum’s design but settling on specific networks—can produce a payment model that can be replicated.
Under the hood, it also uses x402—bringing back the 402 status code in HTTP, which had long been barely used, and tailoring it specifically for stablecoin transactions. The pitch is near-instant confirmation and very low fees. Even more interesting, Will Papper from Cloudflare said that the underlying expansion approach borrows from Ethereum’s original sharding design.
The reason is pretty straightforward: if the future involves AI agents frequently calling resources and paying automatically, the payment layer needs to handle 5 million to 50 million transactions per second, which current blockchains themselves still can’t do. So what’s truly worth watching in this direction is that stablecoin payments are starting to move beyond just payments for people and toward machine-to-machine settlement.
Cloudflare itself covers about 20% of global network traffic. Once an infrastructure company like this gets its on-chain payment interfaces working smoothly, market imagination around ETH scaling, L2 payments, and stablecoin network effects will be elevated again. There are still two things to watch next: first, whether this product sees real usage; and second, whether this route—borrowing Ethereum’s design but settling on specific networks—can produce a payment model that can be replicated.